The trial on rape and kidnapping charges for a retired Roman Catholic priest from New Orleans who is a self-admitted child molester has been delayed indefinitely after the defendant was hospitalized on Tuesday, the morning of jury selection in the case.
The judge set to preside over Lawrence Hecker’s trial, Benedict Willard, also abruptly transferred it to another section of New Orleans’s state criminal courthouse, citing “disrespect” from the lead prosecutor in the case in an unrelated matter.
It is now unclear when the eagerly awaited case may be reset for trial. The case has been reallotted to Judge Nandi Campbell, and Willard said he was hopeful she would docket Hecker’s trial as quickly as possible.
Hecker’s attorneys said they felt for the victim in the case who flew in from out of state for the trial but said their client had the constitutional right to be tried while physically and mentally fit. Multiple people on both sides say they were told Hecker was dealing with a urinary tract infection, at least his second one this year.
Jury selection had been expected to begin on Tuesday in a trial centering on allegations dating back decades that the local Catholic church took steps to cover up. But for it to proceed as scheduled, Hecker had to first clear the latest in a series of mental health evaluations.
A court-appointed doctor on 5 September had found Hecker, 93, competent to stand trial.
Hecker has pleaded not guilty to aggravated rape, kidnapping and other charges filed against him in New Orleans’s state criminal courthouse in September 2023.
The alleged victims in the case, as many as about 10 other witnesses with similar claims against Hecker, and the Louisiana state police investigator who secured permission to arrest the clergyman had been expected to testify.
Records show prosecutors were also prepared to call a forensic nurse practitioner named Anne Troy who specializes in child sexual abuse – and works at the University of Holy Cross, one of New Orleans’s prominent Catholic institutions – as an expert witness.
The victim at the heart of Hecker’s prosecution – who now lives out of state – and his attorney, Richard Trahant, have long maintained that Hecker’s day in criminal court should have come long ago.
Trahant’s client maintains that he was underage and studying at a Catholic high school to which Hecker had ties when the priest choked him unconscious and raped him in about 1975. The accuser has said he reported his rape at Hecker’s hands to the school, though officials there never alerted police.
Though Hecker has denied that accusation, in 1999, he did admit to Catholic church leaders in New Orleans – in a typed statement – that he had molested or sexually harassed several other children whom he met through his work as a priest.
New Orleans’s Catholic archdiocese nonetheless allowed Hecker to work through his retirement in 2002, even giving him a promotion to the position of monsignor and stationing him at a church with a school attached to it. Then the church allowed him to collect full benefits and paid his living expenses for 18 years beyond his retirement.
Under pressure from the worldwide Catholic church’s ongoing, systemic clergy molestation scandal, New Orleans’s archdiocese in 2018 finally notified the public that Hecker – along with dozens of his fellow clerics – had been subjected to substantial child sexual abuse allegations.
The notification triggered so many clergy molestation-related lawsuits that the archdiocese filed for chapter 11 federal bankruptcy protection in 2020, which cut off some of Hecker’s financial support.
Attorneys for certain clergy abuse victims had learned of Hecker’s confession even before the chapter 11 filing and requested a state court’s permission to distribute the documents pertaining to the priest more widely, including to authorities as well as the news media. However, the bankruptcy judge Meredith Grabill later ruled that such documents were shielded from public view by confidentiality orders that she deemed relevant – and added that she intended to “destroy any [sealed] documents that this court received”, according to a July 2020 transcript.
The victim pressing charges against Hecker in the case set for jury selection on Tuesday went to authorities in 2022. But the case stalled until the Guardian obtained a copy of Hecker’s 1999 admissions and exposed them to readers for the first time in June 2023.
The Guardian then shared the confession with the New Orleans CBS affiliate WWL Louisiana, and both outlets confronted Hecker on camera in August 2023. Hecker gave the outlets an 18-minute interview in which he verified his written confession was authentic and explained his alleged belief that the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s emboldened him to do things he now realized were wrong.
About two weeks after the Guardian and WWL published that conversation, the New Orleans district attorney, Jason Williams, secured a grand jury indictment charging Hecker in connection with the complaint brought by Trahant’s client in 2022. The indictment charged Hecker with child rape, aggravated kidnapping, theft and a crime known in Louisiana as aggravated crime against nature.
Hecker would serve mandatory life imprisonment if convicted as charged.
Prosecutors indicate they plan to show video of the Guardian and WWL interview with Hecker as evidence at trial. Dr Sarah Deland, the court-appointed psychiatrist who declared Hecker “fragilely competent” on 5 September, said the televised interview could be used to establish that Hecker understood the charges against him.
Since Hecker’s indictment, the Guardian and WWL Louisiana obtained a video and a transcript of a deposition that he gave under oath to Trahant as the latter man represented another client in a lawsuit seeking damages for child sexual abuse that the clergyman is alleged to have inflicted on the plaintiff. Hecker again affirmed in the December 2020 deposition that his admission to serial child sexual molestation was authentic and described the years of financial as well as moral support he enjoyed from the last four archbishops of New Orleans.
Furthermore, the state police investigation into Hecker has evolved into an ongoing inquiry over whether the archdiocese ran a child sex-trafficking ring responsible for the “widespread … abuse of minors dating back decades” that was “covered up and not reported” to law enforcement, according to statements sworn under oath by authorities. That broader investigation remained ongoing as the scheduled jury selection process for Hecker neared.
Hecker’s trial has the potential to be historic. It has been rare for Catholic clergymen in the city of New Orleans to be charged with – much less convicted of – crimes pertaining to the worldwide church’s abuse scandal.
The last such defendant before Hecker was the deacon George Brignac, who died in 2020 while awaiting trial on child rape charges. The indictment pending against him at the time of his death was the last of four unsuccessful attempts to criminally prosecute Brignac. He had previously been arrested three times between 1977 and 1988, was acquitted at trial once and saw prosecutors drop charges against him on two other occasions.
